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Cantata on the death of Emperor Joseph II, WoO87

Introduction

The death of the Empress Maria Theresia in 1780 and the succession of her son as Joseph II opened a decade of far-reaching enlightened reform in Vienna and the dominions of the Holy Roman Empire. In fact the pace of reform was eventually to prove unsustainable, since Joseph’s reforming zeal was inimical to many sections of the nobility and the higher clergy; the later part of his rule was marked by a certain retrenchment, and on his death in 1790 many of his reforms were reversed. Nonetheless, the Josephinian decade was one of the most brilliant in the history of the Imperial capital, and to music historians it stands out with all the more lustre for its being broadly coextensive with Mozart’s own Viennese decade, from his arrival there in 1781 until his death in 1791.

Beethoven was not to arrive in Vienna until 1792, although he had made a largely abortive visit there in 1787. Bonn, where he was born and received his earliest musical training, was under Viennese dominion, however, and ties to that city were made all the closer when in 1784 Maximilian Franz, brother of Joseph II (and of the future Leopold II), succeeded to the Bonn-based position of Elector of Cologne. Joseph’s Enlightenment principles and policies thus acquired official status at the electoral court. Beethoven was both acquainted and in tune with Enlightenment ideals; the extent of his contact with leading intellectual society in Bonn may be measured by the fact that his teacher Neefe and friends and patrons such as Ries, Simrock and Count Waldstein were all members of the Lesegesellschaft (Reading Society), founded in 1787 as a successor to the recently dissolved Order of Illuminati. And it was the Lesegesellschaft that commissioned Beethoven to set to music a text by Severin Anton Averdonk commemorating Joseph’s death on 20 February 1790 (the news reached Bonn four days later).

The cantata that Beethoven wrote in response to this commission was in fact never to be performed in his lifetime. The reasons for the cancellation of its intended inaugural performance are unknown, but a planned performance at Mergentheim in 1791 was evidently called off due to the difficulty of the score. Nor was it or its companion piece, the Cantata on the accession of Emperor Leopold II (to a text probably also by Averdonk) published until almost a century after its composition, in a supplementary volume to the first complete edition of Beethoven’s works: there would naturally have been no real market that Beethoven himself could exploit for such ephemeral works. Yet the ‘Joseph’ Cantata emerges in retrospect as one of his most important early works, displaying remarkable maturity in a nineteen-year-old composer.

The opening chorus immediately sets the tone, and with a kind of music that is especially prophetic of the later Beethoven. It is set in the quintessentially Beethovenian key of C minor, later to be used for the ‘Pathétique’ Sonata, the Fifth Symphony, and two works specifically associated with death: the Funeral March in the ‘Eroica’ Symphony, and the ‘Coriolan’ Overture. Although drawing on conventional musical gestures associated with grief and mourning (compare, for example, the brooding choruses in Gluck’s Alceste), this chorus displays a characteristic intensity of expression that, far from sublimating the personal into the universal, does exactly the reverse. The highly charged chromaticism of the melodic lines and the harmony, the use of dynamic reinforcement to drive home the effect of syncopation, and the controlled handling of a wide-ranging tonal structure all combine to suggest an intensely personal response to what is, after all, a fairly banal piece of glorificatory text. In the following bass recitative and aria, too, Beethoven is already writing that remorselessly energetic, forwardly driven music that is most immediately associated with the public, celebratory scores of his middle period.

Typically Beethovenian, too, is the handling of long-range structure. Although the Cantata is arranged as a series of discrete ‘numbers’, the tonal connections between them are carefully arranged; and in two cases—between ‘Da kam Joseph’ and ‘Da stiegen die Menschen an’s Licht’, and ‘Hier schlummert’ and the final chorus—there are attacca directions to enhance the sense of continuity. The two main arias are each in ABA'B' binary form, whereby the entire text is set twice, with the second B section being a harmonically reorientated version of the first; and Beethoven skilfully adopted this plan as a means of finding a satisfactory shape for the entire work. That is, the final chorus is a repetition of the opening one, although with its second section recomposed so as to end in the tonic (C minor) rather than the relative major (E flat major). Such replication of a particular feature at different structural ‘levels’ is, again, highly characteristic of Beethoven’s later and better-known music.

To trace in early works the seeds of later greatness is of course a common critical strategy, and one that might sometimes seem to excuse the critic from saying anything directly about the quality of the early work itself. In the case of the ‘Joseph’ Cantata, however, Beethoven himself (who was often dismissive of his early works) indicated his own positive assessment of the music when he reworked the aria and chorus ‘Da stiegen die Menschen an’s Licht’ for ‘O Gott! Welch’ ein Augenblick’ in Leonore and its successor, Fidelio. Not only the music itself but the Enlightenment sentiment of the text that had originally called it forth made it an obvious choice for that particular moment in the opera. Little wonder that Brahms, having studied the rediscovered score of the Cantata in 1884, wrote to Eduard Hanslick, saying: ‘Even if there were no name on the title page, none other could be conjectured—it is Beethoven through and through!’

Recordings

This album of Beethoven choral works presents two fascinating early works, the Cantatas written to mark the death of Joseph II and the accession of his brother Leopold II. Also included are the composer’s homage to Goethe, 'Meeresstille und Glückl ...» More

This album is not yet available for downloadHYP202CDs Super-budget price sampler — Deleted

'More than just a highlight sampler. This is a classy collection, brought together with a great deal of care and attention to musical programming seldom found in this kind of CD … A stocking-filler any music lover would appreciate' (Scotland ...» More

Death, groan it through the barren night! Cliffs cry it again! And you, waves of the sea, howl it through your deeps: Joseph the great is dead! Joseph, the father of immortal deeds, is dead! Alas dead!

He sleeps, freed from the cares of his world. Still is the night, only a shuddering breeze touches my cheek like the breath of the grave. Whoever’s immortal soul you may be, O breeze, blow gently! Here lies Joseph in his grave and slumbers in peaceful sleep until the day of reckoning when you, blest grave, deliver him to eternal crowns.

Death, groan it through the barren night! Cliffs cry it again! And you, waves of the sea, howl it through your deeps: Joseph the great is dead! Joseph, the father of immortal deeds, is dead! Alas dead!